World War Two and the Partisan Struggle 85
Siberia, but no aircraft arrived. Although Dimitrov had repeatedly asked for
help from Molotov, Beria, and Stalin, he was not successful. The most he could
do was to send “recipes” for producing explosives at the end of May 1942.^197
The rebuke from Moscow led to an interesting discussion between Tito and
Moša Pijade. The latter expressed the opinion that the Comintern was proba-
bly right when it said that they had gone too far. Tito answered his two letters
on this subject sharply, suggesting he stop “philosophizing” about the so-called
“leftist deviations.”^198 However, on 6 April, he convened the CC CPY where he
himself called attention to such deviations (especially in eastern Herzegovina,
Montenegro, Vojvodina, and Slovenia), which had assumed worrying dimen-
sions. Some Serbian members of the party even argued that in the second
phase of revolution all peasants, teachers, officers, and priests who had joined
the Partisan movement would have to be killed. They too could be consid-
ered, at least potentially, as future enemies of the working people. In line with
“Grandpa’s” suggestions, Tito and his comrades opted for a new political line
based on the Stalinist theory of a “patriotic war.” Stalin considered the war with
Germany not in ideological terms, Nazism against Bolshevism, but in national
ones—Germany against Russia. This made him critical of Tito’s idea to use the
war for national liberation as a tool for the social revolution, which was taking
the fight into ideological waters. “To prattle on about the world revolution,”
he said, “only favors Hitler and damages the union of all antifascist forces.”^199
Therefore, the CC decided that, from then on, it would stress national libera-
tion rather than class struggle. It also decided to change its attitude toward the
British and toward the royal government in exile, with whom it would no lon-
ger quarrel about ideological matters, but only about the aid offered to the
treacherous Chetniks. Naturally, this adherence to Moscow’s directives did not
imply a renunciation of the revolution, but only the recognition that, for the
time being, it was more opportune to stress the patriotic nature of the up-
rising. This was necessary as even the most fervent “believers” now realized
that there was no sense in waiting for the immediate intervention of the Red
Army. The decision was crucial in giving impetus to the struggle, although in
Montenegro, Herzegovina, and eastern Bosnia it was not easy to stop those
who persevered in “leftist errors.” In spite of it all, “from now on,” wrote Djilas,
“there were no essential changes with regard to the political and tactical line. In
its fight with the occupier the revolution had found itself.”^200
In the middle of January, the Wehrmacht launched the so-called Second
Offensive in eastern Bosnia against what they termed the “bandits,” refusing
them the status and guarantees to which regular combatants were entitled under
international law. By the end of the month it was over, with great suffering. It